


Working It Out

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, minor avengers spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-26 19:24:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6252406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Occasionally, Tony wished he were less successful. If he hadn't built such an amazing gym, for instance, Bucky might not have concussed him for showing a little curiosity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Working It Out

**Author's Note:**

> Everything in this account is reposted from tumblr. And while you're on tumblr, thank cabloom for reading all these half-considered pieces for errors!

Tony took great pride in the fact that even if the super-soldier duo had turned down his  _ incredibly magnanimous  _ offer of a floor in the Tower for some dingy flat in Brooklyn (Tony might own the building. He might have bugged the other apartments, and given all the tenants vouchers for one of the Stark Towers facing New Jersey. What? Pepper’s been telling him to make smarter investments.), they still came to Avengers Tower to use the gym.

After being kicked out of three gyms and two boxing clubs, Steve had admitted that most exercise equipment wasn’t designed to withstand fists flying at peak physical strength. Or peak physical bicycling, apparently.

Bucky still wouldn’t tell Tony what had happened to the elliptical at NYSC.

So when he got tired of the flying motorcycle refusing to so much as take off and asked JARVIS who was around, it wasn’t all that surprising to hear that Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes were availing themselves of the gym that spanned the sixtieth floor. Tony Stark’s exercise equipment drew in soldiers, assassins and spies from miles away.

Apparently, America’s most deadly grandfathers had also figured out how to use the Stark sound system, their phones docked and ear buds tucked in. Steve was running from his problems, while Bucky lifted more weights than Tony wanted to think about off his chest. There had to be a metaphor in there somewhere. Or a joke at someone’s expense.

Curious, Tony snagged one of the headphones out of Steve’s ear. Captain America gave a resigned sigh – or at least, Tony thought he might have, but he couldn’t hear anything over the  _ goddamn wailing wall of sound _ , as Howard Stark had described it when Tony discovered death metal in the ‘80s.

“What the hell?” Tony said, flinging the ear bud away and wincing. Steve powered down the treadmill, rolled his eyes as he went to find the left ear bud under a weight machine, flipped the switch on the right headphone to turn them both off. Stark technology: brilliant even when it was used by World War II relics with no musical taste. “You are not the one I thought would be playing heavy metal.”

“Bucky doesn’t like loud noises,” Steve replied, as though that answered the question of what all-American, apple pie Steve Rogers was doing with Behemoth in his ears.

Well, that was a challenge if Tony had ever heard one. It should be easy to sneak up on the Winter Soldier when he was busy clanking lots of steel bars and plates together. Tony squatted down, snagged the headphone tangled in brown hair – and everything went dark.

When he regained consciousness, Steve was holding out an ice pack wrapped in a towel, and the strains of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” were drifting pleasantly out of the ear bud sitting in Tony’s hand.

“Don’t startle the Winter Soldier,” Tony groaned, putting the cold pack to the goose egg forming on his skull. Had Barnes hit him with the 200 lb weight? “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Would it have mattered?” Steve asked. “You have a pretty thick head.” Tony wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be an insult, or a suggestion that maybe they didn’t need to call the medics after all.

Barnes sat up, nodding to Steve as Captain America headed for the reinforced punching bags, mopping the sweat off his face with the towel in his metal hand. “You gonna give me that back?” He angled his head pointedly at the headphone Tony was still holding, the opening trumpets of another ancient song bleating tinnily from Stark’s sweaty palm.

“Okay,” Tony said, holding onto the ear bud, because making wise choices wasn’t really his forte. “You’re stuck in the past, trying to forget the seventy years of being a merchant of death, I get that. But what’s Captain Pleated Pants over there doing with angry young man music? He’s only qualified for the 'man’ bit!”

The Winter Soldier cracked his admantine knuckles menacingly, and Tony took a moment to feel a burst of pride over the far more sensible terror. Barnes’  _ old  _ bionic arm couldn’t do that. “You think Steve isn’t angry?” Barnes said in Urdu, because he knew Tony hated Urdu, damn it, looking across the room to where Steve Rogers whaled on a Stark® punching bag while gazing fiercely at the Soldier’s amazing new arm.

And Tony had seen the press conferences, the misquoted news bites, where Captain America talked about how Bucky Barnes had been a POW for a really fucking long time and forced to commit several hundred crimes against humanity and decent hairstyling. Hadn’t really been paying that much attention, busy with important science - or making jello in an arc reactor, but lunch was important, too -  while the reporters described Rogers’ as gutted by the horror of it all.

But Rogers didn’t look gutted – demolishing the Stark equipment in a flurry of kicks and jabs – didn’t even resemble a guy who’d been bulldozed by loss. He looked gut-punched, like some guy had taken a dirty shot and knocked Captain America down but not out. He looked  _ furious _ , back on his feet already swinging at every unfair thing that had happened since the war, at every person who had dared to hit Steve where it hurt the most. Who had dared to fuck with Bucky Barnes.

“Oh,” said Tony. Getting hit with a ton of steel weight must have knocked some of the genius out of his brain. Barnes snorted and stole the ear bud back as he pulled Tony to his feet. The world did a hoppy, nauseating little dance to an Ellington tune. “Ow. That’s the last time I sneak up on you.”

Barnes looked a little nauseous himself, at Tony’s belief that he’d caught the Winter Soldier unawares. Or maybe that was amused. “That bruise isn’t because you  _ tried  _ to act like a thief,” he corrected, sliding the headphones off and walking toward the mats, Rogers following his friend like a moth to a flame.

Barnes twisted to glance back over his shoulder at Tony, bared his teeth in what might have been the Russian version of a smile. “It was because  _ nothing _ about Steve came out of a bottle.” He tossed his towel neatly onto Tony’s head, and hummed a few bars of Sinatra as he moved in to flip Captain America to the floor.

Tony programmed both their phones to play British boybands, when he got back to the not-flying bike – but not until JARVIS had locked him safely in the lab.


End file.
